The Assemblagist

The Museum of the Mind: Think­ing of Ruth, Nor­folk 1946

Went up to Williamson, NC yes­ter­day to enter a cou­ple of assem­blage pieces in the Mar­tin County Arts Council’s annual Fine Arts Show. It’s a small town arts coun­cil, served by vol­un­teers and accord­ing to local Beau­fort County Arts Coun­cil Direc­tor Joey Toler, they have no paid admin­is­tra­tor, but I see they do have an inter­net pres­ence. Googling pro­duced some nice sites for Mar­tin County in Florida… don’t be mis­led, here is our own MCAC for NC web­site.

My neigh­bor, Fred Hawkins, rode along and entered a cou­ple of very nice black & white pho­tos. Fred has a “thing” for win­dows. These two pho­tographs were par­tic­u­larly engag­ing because he made frames from wood sal­vaged from the very build­ing con­tain­ing the win­dows. The reclaimed boards cre­ated a nice effect and I truly hope the “judge” of the show appre­ci­ates the double-​hard work Fred did for his entries.

I entered “The Museum of the Mind: Think­ing of Ruth, Nor­folk 1946″ and “Para­chut­ing for Progress”. Para­chut­ing is a piece I truly enjoy look­ing at and so I put the dreaded “NFS” on the entry. It is con­structed of a dis­as­sem­bled wash­stand. My neigh­bor, Miss Patty, trashed it about two months ago and Rob retrieved it from her

Tues­day offer­ings to the Hoard­ing God.

As I con­sid­ered what to put on the new “shelf” I’d con­structed, another neigh­bor, Robin, came over and offered some sug­ges­tions. She was spot-​on when she handed me a small fab­ric doll from her Mom’s col­lec­tion. A per­fect it of color for the faded and crack­ling wood of the piece. I added a

The Museum of the Mind (detail)

res­cued rusted mis­shapen star cookie cut­ter from when the wreck­age of my neighbor’s house, which burned in Sept. 2008. (and she died but that’s another story, right?) Then I added two bot­tles which were res­cued from the Pam­lico River by a diver and applied appro­pri­ate amounts of antiquing solu­tion to dirty that which I’d spent hours clean­ing (duh) and sporked in some dried flow­ers from Mom’s funeral bou­quets which added for some height and upward interest.

My sec­ond entry is “The Museum of the Mind: Think­ing of Ruth, Nor­folk 1946″ My par­ents were sta­tioned in Nor­folk, VA dur­ing WWII. They went together, Dad as a Lieu­tenant and Mom worked as a civil­ian in the Army — inter­view­ing and hir­ing fac­tory work­ers (ie: women from the South). I have some won­der­ful cas­sette record­ings of Mom talk­ing about the women she inter­viewed. Dad’s posi­tion involved the load­ing of Lib­erty Ships. Mom (Ruth) would be 93 tomor­row April 13^th and so the spirit of her influ­ence drove me to cre­ate the Museum. It’s also about my brother, John, who would have been 58. He shared a birth­day with Mom. He died in 1975 by his own hand. I’ll do a Sister-​Piece later on this sum­mer since Ann died last year about eight weeks before Mom. Talk about a crappy time, oh well… on to art… away from sorrow.

The Assem­blage Art process.

It’s all the sense of bal­ance, isn’t it my assem­blag­ist friends? The com­bi­na­tion of items you’ve assem­bled needs to invite peo­ple to dis­cover all the parts, not only the obvi­ous ones.

I don’t usu­ally list the items in my assem­blages but that’s chang­ing today.

Obvi­ously.

The items in the Museum of the Mind include:
Shells my grand­mother col­lected from the beach at Tampa, FL in the 1950s.
Artist books made from Dante and other books folded and repur­posed
Porce­lain hand from a baby doll I bought in Charleston SC
The “boxes” are draw­ers from doll fur­ni­ture my Mom made in the 1980s, I cov­ered them with text from Napier’s Penin­su­lar War (an 1800s book I bought for $1.00 years ago)
A mir­ror from a car­touche — bought in Pitts­burgh at Hello Betty!
Checker­board from Nor­way via Einar
Inte­rior shelf from a tool­box made by Doug Tolar
Sand from inside a bro­ken Rook­wood book­end
sphinx moth cocoon from Mr. Fred’s back­yard (it hatched last week)

more of The Museum

doll car­cass from MacDonald’s kid meal circa 1990s
bot­tle from Robin Clark
mag­ni­fy­ing glass from ebay pur­chase, box of Cana­dian won­der
and more…

Today I’m re-​assembling a back porch stu­dio. With the pollen on the wane, I’m hop­ing to get in some qual­ity shade-​time with my dog art assis­tants. The car­di­nals are back and sit together in the golden rain tree over my head so it’s a nice place to think and assem­ble. Rox­anne has her dog­gie swim­ming pool filled with fresh cool water, Linus is chew­ing on a stick, and Thomp­son is in charge of the scene, as usual.

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